Expedition (NEFA)

Six local artists will embark on a
multi-week expedition to survey and discover resources within the territories
now identified as New England. These
artists will utilize a range of contemporary tools for travel, navigation,
survival, research, and art making in order to maximize the ground
covered and content explored. The route
will be a mixture of wild, rural, sub-urban, and urban areas that will be
selected based on the groups’ interests in the topology and history of
particular sites. The art is the
expedition and it is being realized through collaborative, site sensitive,
durational action.

Expedition Artists:

Daniel S. DeLuca is a Boston based artist who is committed to the idea that an ‘artwork’ can be a process that encompasses many different phases and forms. As a result he identifies his work as project based and concept oriented. Daniel integrates live actions, context specificity, photography, and appropriated materials to explore structures and concepts related to globalizing culture, art, and language. He has shown nationally and internationally in the context of private and public spaces, galleries, and live art festivals. Daniel is currently developing artistic research projects that investigate large-scale reoccurring events around the world. The World Expo (2010) in Shanghai, China, the Spring Equinox Festival (2012) in Mexico, and the Maha Kumbh Mela in India (2013) are three events he has created projects around. In 2012 Daniel was awarded one of the final grants offered by the Berwick Research Institute to develop “The Roaming Kiosk for Semiotics Research and the Creation of New Language”. He became the director of Mobius Inc. in July, 2013.

Jeff is an artist and educator living in Boston and has been performing art for the last 20 years, both nationally and internationally. He is a member of Mobius Artist Group and is the Artistic Director of TOTAL ART. He enjoys the bicycle, the hammer, the saw, the wood, his wife and son, his family, his friends, his work. (…except sometimes he doesn’t enjoy these things as much; it depends.) He is the son and grandson of far more practical people, which he tries to express in his art. Some people say he is more handsome without his glasses, and his mother thinks it is time to stop getting naked in front of people. Oh, and something about death.

In a current political environment in which there is enormous pressure to see in black and white, I think there is value in spending time in a world that requires infinite possibility of meanings and interpretations. Using common, mundane objects, processes and colors, I recombine them so that the meanings and purposes of the acts and objects become unclear or questionable or ripe with new meanings. Warmth and coolness are very important. The warmth of kindness and a welcoming atmosphere toward the performers and the audience members, the cool logic of an abstract point made. Sometimes I feel like we might be at the end of something in our culture, like we’re all just sitting around a dying fire, saying goodbye.

Vela Phelan was born in the Dominican Republic and was raised in Mexico, USA , and Venezuela. Phelan is a time based artist, photographer, gatherer and curator. He is active in many forms such as the collaborations with Jeff Huckleberry as J V, as a member of the sound-ART/performance group Gang Clan Mafia with Dirk Adams, as the sonic sludge installation vibrations of o+ and as a solo time based artist and VJ. Since 1994 Vela has been altering festivals, galleries and museums both nationally, internationally and in the World Wide Web. He believes in magnifying the energy of objects, sounds, video, spaces and actions while blending subconscious with spirit and allowing the unknown to present itself.

Sandrine Schaefer is a Boston-based Artist, Writer, and Curator. She is a co-founder of The Present Tense, an art initiative that produces and archives live art events and exchanges in transient spaces. She has been actively showing her own work and the work of others internationally since 2003.

Sandrine's ephemeral artwork explores cycles of the invisible becoming visible. Sandrine is inspired by site sensitivity, the relationship between accumulative action and endurance, and manipulating duration to challenge the parameters of real time. Her work playfully addresses the shared human experience of fitting in, both corporally and conceptually.